Paradoxes of Catholicism eBook

All things are hers, for she is Christ’s.
Yet, nevertheless, she will suffer the loss of
all things sooner than lose Him.

III

SANCTITY AND SIN

Holy, Holy, Holy!—­IS. VI. 3.

Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners_.
I TIM. I. 15.

A very different pair of charges—­and far
more vital—­than those more or less economic
accusations of worldliness and otherworldliness which
we have just considered, concern the standards of
goodness preached by the Church and her own alleged
incapacity to live up to them. These may be briefly
summed up by saying that one-half the world considers
the Church too holy for human life, and the other
half, not holy enough. We may name these critics,
respectively, the Pagan and the Puritan.

I. It is the Pagan who charges her with excessive
Holiness.

“You Catholics,” he tells us, “are
far too hard on sin and not nearly indulgent enough
towards poor human nature. Let me take as an instance
the sins of the flesh. Now here is a set of desires
implanted by God or Nature (as you choose to name
the Power behind life) for wise and indeed essential
purposes. These desires are probably the very
fiercest known to man and certainly the most alluring;
and human nature is, as we know, an extraordinarily
inconsistent and vacillating thing. Now I am
aware that the abuse of these passions leads to disaster
and that Nature has her inexorable laws and penalties;
but you Catholics add a new horror to life by an absurd
and irrational insistence on the offence that this
abuse causes before God. For not only do you fiercely
denounce the “acts of sin,” as you name
them, but you presume to go deeper still to the very
desire itself, as it would seem. You are unpractical
and cruel enough to say that the very thought of sin
deliberately entertained can cut off the soul that
indulges in it from the favour of God.

“Or, to go further, consider the impossible
ideals which you hold up with regard to matrimony.
These ideals have a certain beauty of their own to
persons who can embrace them; they may perhaps be,
to use a Catholic phrase, Counsels of Perfection;
but it is merely ludicrous to insist upon them as
rules of conduct for all mankind. Human Nature
is human nature. You cannot bind the many by
the dreams of the few.

“Or, to take a wider view altogether, consider
the general standards you hold up to us in the lives
of your saints. These saints appear to the ordinary
common-place man as simply not admirable at all.
It does not seem to us admirable that St. Aloysius
should scarcely lift his eyes from the ground, or
that St. Teresa should shut herself up in a cell, or
that St. Francis should scourge himself with briers
for fear of committing sin. That kind of attitude
is too fantastically fastidious altogether. You
Catholics seem to aim at a standard that is simply